TURKISH AREA STUDIES REVIEWBulletin of the British Association for Turkish Area StudiesSpring 2016 No.27, pp. 46-48.James H Meyer, Turks Across Empires: marketing Muslim identity in the Russian-Ottoman borderlands, 1856-1914, 2014.James H Meyer traces the lives of leading Russian born pan-Turkist and Muslim activists in the tumultuous era leading up to and during the dissolution of the Russian and Ottoman empires, focusing on Yusuf Akcura, Ismail Gasprinskii, and Ahmet Agaoglu. A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan.The first is in the late 19th century Russia where they lead a modernising mission amongst the far- flung Muslim population of Russia variously numbered as 20 million despite waves of expulsions and pogroms. They promote curriculum reform - known as usul-i cedid that Meyer calls jadidism, introducing sciences and maths in the Moslem schools in Russia. Ismail Gasprinskii, a Crimean Tartar based in Bahcesaray, is the key figure forging a common Turkic language called Lisan-i umumi that was a hybrid of Ottoman Turkish and Tartar, in his journal called Tercuman (Interpreter) established in 1883 that had a circulation of 5-6000 throughout Russia. This period corresponded to the policies of the tsarist authorities to increase the assimilation of Muslim communities, including compulsory Russian language teaching in schools. These policies were resisted by the traditional Muslim ulema, who saw the measures as an attack on their cultural and religious autonomy and a precursor to forced conversions. The ulema were not keen on the new jadidist schools either most of which had accepted the teaching of Russian as a practical necessity for Muslims.The new schools, backed and funded by mostly wealthy Tatar benefactors, mushroomed after the Russian 1905 revolution. This marks the second phase of the story of the Russian born Muslim and pan-Turk leaders who transition from community activists to national politics. During 1905-06, they organised three All-Russian Muslim Congresses, formed a political union called Ittifak, and entered the Russian Duma winning 25 seats in an electoral alliance with the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). Yet, when the tsarist crackdown began in 1906, Yusuf Akcura and many others were imprisoned for “terrorist” activities. Wholesale closure of the new schools followed.The third phase sees many —with the exception of Gaspriinski who remained in Crimea, fleeing Russia to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire and settling in Istanbul. The attraction of Istanbul to the Russian Muslim emigres was enhanced by the Ottoman 1908 revolution and the ready audience amongst the Young Turks to their ideas. These years were the political highpoint of the Russian born pan-Turkic figures. Along with pan-Islamism, and pan- Ottomanism, pan-Turkism was considered as one of three options for the Ottoman Empire – as penned by Akcura.1 With the loss of the Balkans and growing resistance to Ottoman rule in the Middle Eastern provinces, pan-Turkism increasingly appeared as the only option to the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). As WWI broke out, the military trio of Enver-Talat-Cemal embraced pan-Turkism with an anti-Russian thrust and its catastrophic consequences for the Armenian population in Anatolia.The influence of the Russian born pan-Turkists declined rapidly thereafter. By 1919, the victory of the Allies resulted in the carving up of what was left of the Ottoman Empire with the CUP leadership rooted out and sent to prison in Malta by the British who occupied Istanbul. This included Ahmet Agaoglu who had served as an MP in both the Ottoman and Azerbaijan parliaments. Pan-Turkic figures remaining in Turkey were also reined in and some imprisoned, by Mustafa Kemal who sought support of Bolshevik Russia against the occupying armies of the Allies. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 Yusuf Akcura and Ahmet Agaoglu, the latter after a brief period in parliament and an attempt to set up an opposition party, receded to the background with academic positions in Istanbul University. Others, such as Fatih Kerimi, returned to Russia where in the initial years of the revolution the Bolsheviks had adopted jadidist ideas in their approach to the nationalities question, but only to fall victim in 1937 to Stalin’s purges2.

This book is an important contribution in several ways. First, it completes a missing piece of the puzzle on pan-Turkism. Meyer’s interest is not so much the political currents and strategic developments in Europe that gave rise to pan-Turkist ideas, but in tracing the lives of its leading individuals in Russia. 19th century was the era of numerous “pan” ideas with pan-Turkism embraced by a wide swath of peoples including not just Russian born Moslems, Ottoman Turks, but also Hungarians. Pan-Turkism emerged in response to pan-Slavism in Russia which in turn was initially a reaction to pan-Germanism of the Bismarck era.3 Turks across Empires focuses on the practical, physical and economic motivations of the pan-Turkic figures in responding to the specific revolutionary conditions prevailing at the time of the decline of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Meyer shows that they were very much a product of their “trans-imperial” lives which included extensive studies in European capitals and travel between the two multi-ethnic empires.Second, the book brings to light rarely examined actors in Russian history. The roles of Russian born Moslem and pan-Turkic figures in late 19th century Russia, their part in the 1905 or the 1917 revolutions have not hitherto received much attention by historians. For example Meyer reports that following the 1905 revolution, the “countercoup of June 3, 1907 targeted Muslims in particular” especially the proponents of the new schools. He also notes the tsarist authorities were assisted in their crack-down by the traditional conservative ulema who took the opportunity to eliminate their rivals. This pattern of repression of the modernising, secular Muslim leadership by authorities while forging an alliance with the traditional conservative Islamists was to become a pattern to be repeated in the 20th century. Finally, by tracing the evolution of the ideas and lives of these figures, Meyer also shows how ethnic and religious identity became increasingly politicised in the lead up to WWI. He suggests there are lessons from this period for today given the politicisation of culture and religion that we still face one-hundred years on.Mina Toksoz 26 April 20151 “Three Types of Policy” by Yusuf Akcura had been published by Turk, a Cairene newspaper in 1904.2 See Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp704-716, 1996.3 See for example, Jacob Landau, Pan Turkism in Turkey, 1981.

Earlier
this week I went to see "Mustafa," Can Dündar's controversial new
documentary about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.

I have always considered Dündar a rather bland figure, well-known for his
vaguely liberal left-of-center and very uncontroversial views. Dündar
is a newspaper columnist who has written a number of books on
contemporary affairs, but he'd always struck me as someone who was more
interested in asking questions than in staking out an opinion. Fifteen
years ago he came out with an earlier documentary of Atatürk which I
have never seen, but which was tame enough to have served as standard
fare for Turkish elementary school classrooms every since. It was
therefore surprising to hear that many people had found his latest
endeavor insulting to Atatürk, even in a country where hagiography
often passes for history when it comes to Turkey's first president.

I found the first half of 'Mustafa' much less interesting than the
second. Indeed, Dündar is mainly concerned with the Turkish War of
Independence and subsequent years, so the parts of the film detailing
Mustafa Kemal's childhood and early career offer little excitement.
Indeed, Dündar seems to be in a bit of a hurry to get on to the War of
Independence, skipping over major events like the Unionist takeover in
1908 and Kemal's activities in Libya. There is, in fact, much about
Kemal's life during these years that I think audiences would find
interesting, but Dündar doesn't stray far from the general outlines of
Kemal's life that are already of general knowledge in Turkey. As a
result, the film feels like it is simply going through the motions at
this stage while Dündar looks ahead to the second half of the film.

The
so-called 'Trial of the Century' began here today. Eight-six people,
including a number of retired generals and prominent journalists, have been accused of plotting to overthrow the government.
The undertaking was supposedly called 'Ergenekon.' It is so strange, so
sensational, that frankly I have no idea what to believe.

It
all started on June 29 of last year, when police raided a home in the
Ümraniye district of Istanbul, where they found a stock of weapons. Six
months later, in January of 2008, police took thirty-three suspects
into custody, claiming they were part of a terrorist group that had
been carrying out political assassinations in Turkey, including the
January 2007 murder of Hrant Dink,
editor of an Armenian-language newspaper in Istanbul. The suspects
rounded up included a former Major General by the name of Veli Küçük, a
retired army colonel named Fikret Karadağ, a journalist for the
newspaper Akşam, Güler Kömürcü, and several other figures. One of the
most intriguing names to emerge from the early investigation was Sami
Hoştan, who was involved in the Susurluk scandal from the late 90s
(more on that below). Police claimed that they had found a so-called
'death list' created by the group which included the names of Kurdish
political figures like Ahmet Türk, Leyla Zana, Sebahat Tuncel, and
Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir, as well as Nobel Prize-winning author
Orhan Pamuk and Zaman newspaper journalist Fehmi Konru. The
group, which police claimed was a nationalist death squad with links to
the state, was called Ergenekon.

Nobody's talking about it in the
United States, but a serious political crisis has broken out in
Ukraine. Those of you keeping score might remember that in 2004 the Orange Revolution brought a pro-Western government
to power in Kyiv, and since then Ukraine and Georgia have emerged as
the two most important allies of the United States among republics of
the former Soviet Union which have not already joined NATO.

The
crisis has been brought on by a feud between two of America's most
important supporters in the country, President Viktor Yushchenko and
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. On Wednesday, Tymoshenko joined forces with Viktor Yanukovich
(who was the Moscow-sponsored opponent of Yushchenko in the 2004
elections) in supporting a measure to limit the president's powers. The
rumors are now that Tymoshenko and Yanukovich will form a coalition
government with Tymoshenko as Prime Minister.

Yushchenko's supporters have accused Tymoshenko of treason
and Yushchenko himself has threatened to dissolve parliament and call
new elections--a move which seems unlikely given his party's own weak
standing in opinion polls.

All
of this comes at a time when Washington finds itself in an increasingly
defensive position in Eurasia. After the heady days of 2004-2005 and
the installation of pro-American governments in Georgia and Ukraine,
the Bush administration's goals of incorporating both countries into
NATO have already contributed to the partitioning of Georgia and risk
creating a similarly volatile situation in Ukraine, where the idea of
joining the alliance is anathema to the large Russian-speaking
population of the country.

As I argued in a recent posting,
the Bush administration's obsession with extending NATO membership to
these countries is self-defeating. In Ukraine, the prospect of joinging
the EU would be a far less divisive and equally effective means of
guaranteeing Ukrainian territorial integrity. Indeed, Washington's
current plans of putting Ukraine and Georgia on the fast track to
membership in NATO could very well lead to the very breakup of Ukraine
that Washington is seeking to avoid by promoting its membership.
Particularly in today's heated atmosphere, Russians in
Ukraine--particularly in the the Crimea--are simply not going to stand
for it.

The other day in the New York Times Ellen Barry had an article
on the separatist movement in Tatarstan. According to Barry, the
Russian government's abandonment of a policy of steadfast support for
the principle of territorial integrity in the face of separatist
movements has already attracted the attention of separatists within
Russia.

“In
the long term, they could have signed their own death warrant,” said
Lawrence Scott Sheets, the Caucasus program director for the
International Crisis Group, an independent organization that tries to
prevent and resolve global conflicts. “It’s an abstraction now, but 20
years down the road, it won’t be such an abstraction.”

Well,
the big story here is of course Russia's recognition of the
independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On Russian state
television, the decision is being presented quite clearly as a response
to the recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year by the
United States and the European Union. Indeed, an extended excerpt of a
speech by Vladimir Putin in Germany last June in reaction to the
recognition of Kosovo's independence was shown on the news tonight. I'd
never seen it, but in it he clearly says that if such rules apply to
Kosovo, then they can apply to countries all over the world.

Indeed,
Russia's recognition today marks a reversal of a policy Russia had
followed since the end of the Cold War, in which Moscow steadfastly
insisted upon the principle of territorial integrity while the United
States and the European Union recognized the independence of one state
after another in the Balkans. While Russian support for Belgrade was
often presented in the Western media in terms of some kind of mystical
Orthodox brotherhood between the two countries, in fact Russia
supported Yugoslavia's territorial integrity because the Russian
Federation is itself divided into republics and autonomous regions
which could likewise break apart--and which appeared to be, for much of
the 1990s. Thus, despite the fact that the Russian government for years
supported the breakaway republics in Georgia, it never went as far as
to recognize their independence--until now.

I'm in Kazan, now. It's been an
incredibly busy week, as my final days in Ufa involved a lot of work
and numerous courtesy calls. Now I'm looking forward to settling down
again and getting some more work done in Kazan.

As I mentioned earlier, I
spent the first part of the week working in the archive of Rizaeddin
Fahreddin, someone who was much involved in Muslim activist circles in
the late imperial period and later became the second mufti of the
Soviet Union. Fahreddin's archive is useful not only for the material
relating to Fahreddin himself, but also for its wealth of documents
pertaining to the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly. Indeed, Fahreddin
spent much of his time as mufti going through documents in the Orenburg
Spiritual Assembly's archive. In some instances, he recopied materials
into his notebooks, but many of the documents here are originals.

Russian Academy of Sciences, Ufa

The materials on
the Orenburg Assembly are not as vast as those of the Central State
Historical Archives in Ufa, but I would think that anyone working on
the Orenburg Assembly would definitely want to look at them. I should
also say that Ramil Makhmutovich has provided a real service to
research into Islam in Russia by cataloguing this large fond of materials.

Monday and Tuesday were thus spent
working intensely at the archive of the Academy of Sciences, where I
took over one thousand photographs of documents. On Wednesday, however,
we took an excursion. Ramil Mahmutovich (Bulgakov) had suggested that
we visit the grave of Rizaeddin Fahreddin, so on Wednesday the two of
us went there, accompanied by the historian Marsil Farkhshatov, as well
as Gülnar Iuldibaeva, a folklorist at the Academy of Sciences in Ufa,
and Liliia Baibulatova, a kandidat nauk from Kazan who recently published a book on Fahretdinov's Asar. Then we all went to a restaurant looking over the Ufa river and had lunch.

After lunch, we headed back to the Academy of Sciences so that I could deliver my otchet,
or report on my activities, to the Director of the Academy, Professor
Firdaus Khisamitdinova, a former Minister of Education for the Republic
of Bashkortostan. It also turned out that Firdaus hanım is an
old friend of Flera Safiullina, one of my Tatar teachers from way back
in Kazan. Some photographs were taken, after which I was presented with
a book. All in all, a nice afternoon.

On Thursday, I took
the bus from Ufa to Kazan. It's a lot cheaper than flying ($35 versus
$170), and shorter than the train (ten hours, they said, versus
twenty-two). In all, the trip ended up taking sixteen hours, two of
which were spent sitting by the side of the road ten miles outside of
Kazan due to construction. It was a pretty lousy trip, but not much
worse than expected.

In
Kazan I was picked up at the bus station by Lolla, the woman from whom
I'm renting an apartment here. Lolla is orginally from Abkhazia, and
like everyone else I've ever met from the Caucasus is extremely
hospitable. Indeed, this morning she was taking her children to the
"Blue Lakes" outside Kazan and called to ask if I wanted to go. They're
quite interesting--today was my first time there. Due to mineral
deposits they are a deep blue-green color, and for some reason are
extremely cold--no warmer than the mid-forties, in my estimation. When
I jumped in the first time, I felt my heart contract and thought I was
going to die for sure. It was so cold I could barely feel my toes after
just a few seconds. The most anyone could do was swim from one side of
the pond to the other--a distance of about forty feet. It was
definitely refreshing, though, and fun.

In
the afternoon on Friday I worked for a couple of hours at home until
heading down to Bauman Street to meet Igor, my old landlord from my
Fulbright year. Igor has since sold the apartment I used to live in and
is planning to emigrate to South Africa, but for the time being is
renting a place on Tatarstan Street. Both he and his girlfriend, Sveta,
love going to Ikea, which is located in the enormous Mega shopping
center on the edge of town. I drove out there with them, and we sat in
Ikea for a few hours, drinking tea in the Ikea cafe and chatting about
people we know. Then we were joined by a couple of Igor's friends, who
were also hanging out at Mega.

A
friend of mine, Ramil, owns an apartment out near Mega, so after
leaving the shopping center Igor dropped me off there, where I had
dinner with Ramil, his cousin, and his sister. After speaking with Igor
and his friends in Russian all afternoon, it was fun to switch into
Tatar, something which reminded me of one of the reasons why I like
this city so much.

At
eleven I got up to leave. In Kazan the public transportation shuts down
pretty early, so I had to go home by "taxi"--meaning I flagged down
someone in a car and came to an agreement with him on a price.

I
remember taking a "taxi" like this for the first time, when I lived in
Kazan in 2003-2004. I was really anxious about it, and only did so
after having spent a couple of months here. Ultimately, climbing into
the car of a complete stranger in the middle of the night--or at
dawn--became second nature, making small talk in Russian or Tatar as we
sped down the road listening to techno on the radio.

Anyway,
the guy who picked me up was a recent graduate of the Law Institute
here, and we started to chat. He asked me my name, told me his was
Timur, and by the time we got to my apartment near Sovetskaia Ploshchad' he asked me if he could take my picture. "No one's gonna believe this" he said to himself after snapping a couple of photos.

Whatever,
I guess all of this sounds a bit self-aggrandizing--and it's not as if
people here automatically go nuts upon meeting a foreigner. But all the
same, there aren't nearly as many foreigners here as there are in St.
Petersburg and Moscow, and people here are less stand-offish about
making conversation than they can be in the capitals. Indeed, one of
the great things about living in provincial Russia is that it is much
easier to make contact with people.

The
other great thing about living in Kazan is getting the chance to hear
two languages constantly throughout the day. Indeed, while bilingual
signs (Russian and Bashkir) are more present in Ufa than in Kazan, it
seems to me that I hear a lot more Tatar on the street here than I hear
Bashkir or Tatar in Ufa. In Kazan, I feel like I can live in both
worlds, a feeling I think I've only really had elsewhere when I was a
student in Montreal. Two languages, two religions, two great
civilizations.

Granted,
there are a lot of things about living abroad--and particularly about
living in Russia--that I can find exasperating, things that I tend not
to write about here. Especially at times like this, however, I feel
really, really lucky to have been able to have the kind of experiences
I've had over here.

***

To see more photos from the Caucacus journey, go to the photos page of jhmeyer.net.

Something
about the recent crisis in South Ossetia that needs to be underscored
is the absolute necessity of the next US president coming to some kind
of understanding with Russia over the fate of the mini-republics, the
“national” republics within states which have been the conflict zone of
Eurasian space since the end of the Cold War. Chechnya, the republics
of the former Yugoslavia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia
are all examples of such “mini-republics,” regions which had their own
state apparati--usually autonomous regions or republics within
Yugoslavia or the republics of the former USSR.

As I discussed in my
post yesterday, the question of when to recognize the independence of
mini-republics and when to support the territorial integrity of larger
state entities has never been answered consistently. Indeed, after
years of insisting upon the sanctity of respecting the territorial
integrity of states, Russia has now become more aggressive in defending
separatism when it suits its interests. The United States, which for
years has supported separatist movements when it felt like it, is now
up in arms over Russia's support for South Ossetia.

Well, it's been a long day but a good
one. I was supposed to call the Academy of Sciences first thing this
morning to see if they had decided to let me research there or not. Two
weeks ago when I applied for permission they told me I'd find out
within a week, but when I called them last week they had hemmed and
hawed and told me to call back a week later. I therefore had assumed
that it wasn't going to work out, and so went out to a bar last night
with Albert and a few of his friends.

Indeed,
I'd only been out a couple of times in Ufa since arriving here a month
ago, and I'll be leaving later this week. I figured it was time to do
something other than sit inside all day in front of my computer. So, in
the daytime I walked around town taking photographs, and in the evening
called up Albert and proposed getting a few beers at Ogni Ufi, a complex consisting of a number of bars and an outdoor terrace not too far from my apartment.

Well,
it's not looking good right now in South Ossetia, a republic that
Georgia and most of the rest of the world recognizes as part of
Georgia, but which the South Ossetian and Russian governments consider
independent. Russian troops have been stationed in South Ossetia for
years, where the Russian ruble is the currency and where most people
have been given Russian citizenship. Today, some of their soldiers were
killed when Georgian troops attacked in an apparent effort to retake
the region. Russian troops then responded in force, sending tanks across the border.
I won't go into details about what is actually happening there, since
the facts are in dispute and my only access to news right now is
Russian television. However, I can make a few observations.

It's rainy and cold
again here. Actually, it's kind of nice at night--with the temperatures
dipping into the low fifties--to sleep with the windows open and listen
to the rain while a cool breeze blows into the apartment. I've been
sleeping really well, although that also might be due to the fact that
I've been working twelve hours a day. Last night I didn't call it quits
until after three, and I was up again at eleven today working some more.

Hardly anybody is talking about it in the American media, but the implementation of new regulations
by the US Department of Homeland Security has made the nightly news in
Russia two nights in a row, where it has been criticized as a
"violation of human rights." The measures allow US customs agents to
copy any and all data on people's electronic hard drives, and even
confiscate people's computers.

To
what depths have we sunk when Russian state television is able to
chastise the US government--and rightly so--for its intrusions into
people's personal freedoms?

Well,
today was my birthday--and a great day it was. For the last ten days or
so, I've been working a lot not only in the archives, but also on an
article that's been a part of my life for too long. Today, like most
days, I spent the morning working on the article before heading off to
the archive. I came home again at around four in the afternoon, sat
down and started working again on the article. I didn't get up again
until after eleven.

And
now, the article is pretty much finished! I'm going to send it off to
some friends of mine, see what they think about it, then look at it
again myself in a week or so. Hopefully I'll be able to submit it
before too long.

Robert D. Crews’ For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006) is one of the more interesting and thought-provoking works to emerge from the growing list of studies that have been produced over the past two decades with regard to the Muslim communities of late imperial Russia. Following on the heels of the work of Danil’ D. Azamatov (in particular, his masterly Orenburgskoe Magometanskoe dukhovnoe sobranie v kontse XVIII-XIX vv.), Crews’ study is an examination of the role of “official” Islam in the Russian Empire, and of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly in particular.

Well,
I've finished my first week of work in Ufa and it has been really
great. The folks in the archive have been friendly, and I've been able
to get through a good amount of material here without being
overwhelmed. All in all, there wasn't all that much that I needed to
look through here, since I'd worked here for a few weeks back in 2005.
However, there had been a number of questions which had come up since
then and which I wanted to investigate here, and I think the two weeks
that I'll end up working in the archive this month will be enough time
to find whatever the archive has to help me answer them.

Just a
quick update now while I'm on online. Things are going well. I've been
working in the archive the past few days--they're treating me nicely.
As was the case when I worked here in 2005, they allow unlimited (and
free) use of digital cameras, which makes the work go faster. I've been
looking at some of the opisi of the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly
that I didn't get a chance to look at last time, as well as some other
materials relating to the provincial governor's office and other
branches of regional administration.

As
I have no telephone line at home, I won't be able to regularly update
this website. So, I'm just going to make the posts as always and will
update when I can. Thus, there will probably be times when no posts
appear for days or even weeks, followed by the sudden appearance of
several postings all at once. I don't think there's any other way, at
least until I'm back in Turkey. We'll see.

Ever since my old standby hotel in Moscow, the Rossiia, was demolished (here's
a clip of the implosion--it's too short but gives you an idea of the
immense size of this place) I've been without a regular place to stay
in this town. The Rossiia was a dump but it was an enormous
dump, so I could always get a room there. It wasn't a bad deal--for
about $40 it was possible to stay right across the street from Red
Square.

I miss the Rossiya

Hotels in Moscow are really expensive, so for a while I tried staying at the Izmailovo Gamma-Delta Hotel, but I just got sick of it. Not only is the Gamma-Delta as much of a dump as the Rossiia was, but it's also rather pricey in its own right and is just too far away to be much fun.

Well,
I've made it to Moscow! It's a little hard to imagine that just a few
days ago I was still in Ann Arbor. It's been a tiring trip, but really
exciting. On Thursday afternoon I flew from Istanbul to Moscow--the
first time I'd flown into Moscow since 1998. A lot has changed. Indeed,
the last several times I've flown to Russia I've arrived in St.
Petersburg and (more frequently) Kazan, and my waiting time in customs
and passport control has always ranged between one and three hours.
This time, in contrast to my last arrival at Sheremetyevo airport in
1998 (when I waited three hours and didn't get out of the airport until
five am), I breezed through passport control in just a couple of
minutes. Then, I boarded Sheremetyevo's brand new airport train, which goes from the airport to the Savyolovskaia train & metro station in about twenty minutes. Here is a shot of the inside of the train, and here is a photo of some of the scenery that I passed through en route into town.

An article by Andrew E. Kramer
appearing on the website of the New York Times last night reports on
the awarding of no-bid contracts to Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and
Chevron.

The
no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed
over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia,
China and India.

While
the contracts are not large, they are considered important by industry
analysts for establishing position with respect to a series of
lucrative new contracts which are expected to open up soon.

“The
bigger prize everybody is waiting for is development of the giant new
fields,” Leila Benali, an authority on Middle East oil at Cambridge
Energy Research Associates, said in a telephone interview from the
firm’s Paris office. The current contracts, she said, are a “foothold”
in Iraq for companies striving for these longer-term deals.

One
question: since the oil companies are obviously benefiting from the
American occupation of Iraq, when are they going to start paying some
of the war's costs?

I'm
leaving New York tomorrow, unfortunately. Don't get me wrong--I'm
looking forward to spending the next two weeks in Rhode Island. But at
the same time, I already feel nostalgic for the year that is coming to
an end tomorrow.

When
I received the Harriman fellowship last year, I originally told them
that I could only do it for one semester. I'd already received the
NEH-ARIT fellowship for seven months in Turkey, and decided to spend
one semester in New York and then the second semester in Istanbul.

I've
been pretty busy lately preparing to leave New York, and one of the
many tasks I've been tackling has been returning to Columbia's library
the dozens of books I've got stacked all over my apartment and office.
There are a number of books about which I'd like to write a few lines,
without going through the bother of writing a full review, and this
site seems like a good place to do it.

From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

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Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review